Where are the Hurricanes Mr. Gore?

That god among men and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, told us in “An Inconvenient Truth”, his Oscar-winning documentary, that we had to brace for increasing numbers of hurricanes as the result of global warming.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

The hurricane season that runs from June through October is about to end with nothing more than one weak to borderline moderate tropical storm that hit Florida’s panhandle, but there have been NO hurricanes.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Trying to predict how many hurricanes there will be each year is probably fun, but is a highly risky undertaking. I have a lot of friends among the meteorological and climatological community, men of science, but I always cross my fingers for them when they take a run at it.

This year, Bill Gray of Colorado State, perhaps the best known among the hurricane forecasters, thought there would be at least 7 hurricanes of which 3 would be major. Weather Services Inc. agreed with Dr. Gray and, over at Accuweather, the prediction was for 8 hurricanes of which 2 would be major.

NOAA and the National Weather Service do not predict hurricanes, but as political as well as scientific entities they have a very bad track record of trying to confirm Al Gore’s global warming claims.
In March, William J. Broad, reporting in The New York Times, noted that Gore’s “scientific audience is uneasy” in the wake of his global warming documentary. “These scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.”

In Great Britain, a judge ruled that the documentary could not be shown in the schools unless teachers read a long list of its erroneous claims.

Since an increase in hurricanes was one of his dramatic claims along with rising sea levels and disappearing polar bears, Gore is batting zero these days. The sea levels have been rising a few inches every century for millennia and it is generally conceded that the polar bear population since the 1950s has been thriving.

In May, hurricane specialist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami disputed theories that “global warming” has caused more hurricanes. His study was published in The Journal of Climate.

Landsea, like all meteorologists who haven’t been in a coma since the 1980s, knows that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998. Thus, the warmth that feeds hurricanes has diminished and is likely to stay that way for decades to come.

Landsea’s research showed that, since the mid-1990s, the average number of hurricanes per year had almost doubled what it was during the few prior decades, about on par with hurricane activity in the early 20th century. “It’s busy, yes, but not anything we haven’t seen before,” said Landsea while attending the Florida Governor’s Hurricane Conference in May.

For the non-scientist, that should confirm that hurricanes are governed by natural cycles, not some non-existent, dramatic increase called “global warming.”

Though what I know about hurricanes would fit comfortably in a bug’s ear, I am nonetheless tempted to suggest that the cooling cycle the Earth entered in 1998 may be a contributing factor to why this year’s hurricane season is, at this writing, minus any hurricanes.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Known as “the Gore factor”, it is the irony of blizzards or severe snow storms that seem to follow him around whenever he delivered one of his “global warming” speeches.

It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.

Climate change: It’s all in the clouds.
“All sunshine makes a desert.” This is an old Arabic proverb. The Arabs should know. They have a lot of deserts and more desert land is added every year in the Muslim world. Is this due to global warming, or is it due to mismanagement of precious water resources, overgrazing and cutting down of trees?
“The planet has a fever,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore said March 2007 in a joint congressional hearing. “The science is settled,” Gore told the lawmakers. ”Carbon-dioxide emissions — from cars, power plants, buildings and other sources — are heating the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara warned Sep 30 in Copenhagen during his speech about Tokyo’s bid for the Olympics that the 2016 Olympics could be the last Games, with global warming an immediate threat to mankind.
Many years ago the summers in eastern USA were full of thunderstorms, but not too many day long rains. In the 1960’s, the increased burning of high sulfur coal and diesel fuel led to day long “acid rains”. The fish died in lakes that already were too acidic.
Then most of the coal fired power plants got scrubbers, low sulfur diesel fuel was mandated and the rain again got less acid.
The carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continued, this acts as a green house gas, and the earth would then get warmer, the more CO2, the warmer the earth. This looked like a sure thing around 1999, when the alarm sounded: Unless we drastically reduce the CO2 emissions, we will face a thermal runaway, and life as we know it will be no more.
The polar ice caps were melting at an alarming rate, and we could see an ice-free arctic summer in less than 20 years (or was it 50? The number of years seems to vary.)
“Recent projections suggest polar bears could be extinct within 70 years.” The Telegraph recently announced.
This seemed true until mid 2007, when the yearly melting of the icecaps suddenly stopped and the ice caps started growing again.
The Arctic polar ice cap as of Sep 15 2009 is 5 million square kilometers, up 23% from 2007.
The Antarctic ice cap as of Sep 16 2009 is 18.5 million square kilometers, up 5% from 2008, and up 3% from 1979 – 2000 average.
On the 8th of October it was announced that the ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history (World Climate Report). Did you miss the headlines?
2009 has been a different year. The clouds seem to have changed character again. The clouds over Pennsylvania this summer reminded me of the Swedish clouds of my childhood. Something must have changed to make the clouds look more Nordic.
Then I read an article about solar winds and how they affect cosmic rays. The article was written by the Dane Henrik Svensmark (born 1958), a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.
The article is sure to cause controversy over Svensmark’s theory of cosmic ray to cloud modulation, which is said to be affecting earth’s climate. Svensmark says this is now leading to a global cooling phase. Just a couple of weeks after Svensmark’s bold announcement, NASA has announced that we have hit a new record high in Galactic Cosmic Rays, up 19% from the last recorded peak to a new space age high.
Suddenly a lot of things that has puzzled me about climate change started to make sense. We are much more dependent on the variations in the sun than previously thought, but not for the reasons we thought. The Sun has regular 11 year cycles of magnetic activity. The magnetic activity rises and falls again. This has almost no effect on the weather, so something else must cause the weather changes.
How could cosmic radiation cause clouds? Let us take an analogy with boiling water. It boils at the boiling point. If distilled water is used it heats up above the boiling point and erupts in a burst of bubbles that can be quite dangerous. If de-ionized water is used it is even more pronounced. The gas bubbles must have a core of something to form from.
It is the same thing with condensation. The air can be super-saturated with moisture and nothing happens unless there is a surface to condensate on. Dust particles and ions will do fine, but if the air is clean there will be no clouds.
The cosmic radiation that hits the earth comes from distant super-nova explosions and is assumed to be constant. Most of it is absorbed in the solar wind that surrounds the earth, but some particles survive and enter the earth’s atmosphere. The speed of the particles is very close to the speed of light, so they have an enormous energy. When they hit the atmosphere they ionize the molecules they come in contact with, not once, but many times, and they leave a trail of ions until they are fully absorbed in the atmosphere. This trail is an ideal condensation trail, and clouds can form. As with the example of boiling water, once it starts, the clouds feed on themselves.
So, this is the reason the clouds have changed character. The Iron Nuclei cosmic radiation is 4 times more in 2009 than it was in 2000. The clouds are more disbursed, smaller and with less energy each, but over larger areas. Since clouds cause cooling of the earth, it explains the recent cooling trend. It also explains why the tropical storms could not get organized but dissipated rather than develop into full blown hurricanes. As an added bonus the Ozone layer is recovering.
So, Mr. Gore, the science is not settled, the interesting part has just begun. Right now, there is a team of scientists at the CERN supercollider investigating cosmic radiation and its ability to form clouds in a condensation chamber. The results will not be available for a while, but when the results are reported we will find that all climate models have overestimated the CO2 influence, and underestimated the importance of clouds as temperature regulators.
What does this mean for the future of the politics of climate change? Rather than concentrating on CO2 emissions we should concentrate on the water management of the earth. The disappearance of Lake Aral and Lake Tsad, the lowering of the water table in many environmentally vulnerable areas of the world is a much greater danger to the environment. This is mostly happening in Muslim and other totalitarian areas of the world. Now, that’s an inconvenient truth, Mr. Gore!
Lennart Bilén, 2009

The largest number of major hurricane strikes on the mainland U.S. occurred during the period from 1941 to 1950. Ten major hurricanes (Cat 3,4,5) struck the coasts. This decade also featured the largest number of hurricane strikes for all categories. I think that the total was 24. (See NOAA technical memorandum NWS TPC-5 by Landsea et al.)

The fewest number of major hurricane strikes (1951 and later) occurred during the period from 1971 to 1950. Only four major ‘canes hit the coasts.

Generally speaking, there was an uptrend in hurricane strikes that lasted about 50 years from 1911 to 1960 and that period was followed by a downtrend in strikes that ran from 1961 to 2000 or about 40 years. It was during the downtrend that coastal development and population densities mushroomed. Hence, when cyclonic activity returned to the mean, far more people and structures were at risk than ever before.

The current decade is one hurricane strike above the long term averages for major hurricanes and for all categories. From 2001 through today, there have been 7 major hurricane strikes (average is 6.2) and 19 strikes for all categories (average is 17.9). Neither of these totals is extraordinary and there is only one year left in the decade.

Second, I believe hurricanes do not totally ignore their cycles even during global warming.

Third, when the next hurricane “up cycle” converges with global warming and with the Mayan Doomsday calendar in the year 2102, you’ll be asking why so many hurricanes even though you know hurricanes and the 2012 are just coincedences. But global warming is not a coincedence.

Alan Caruba,
I love his writing.
He is incredible productive, you can find a new little gem every day.
A true defender of the American Dream.
“Where are the Hurricanes Mr. Gore” is a typical for his style of writing.
To the point, razor sharp, well informed about the facts with a healthy dose of sarcasm and a snuff of humor if the subject allows it.

There has to be that 500% increase in the rate of global warming (a la IPCC) for there to be an emergency. There is no evidence of that, whatever, and a mountain of evidence against the likelihood.

And further, this assumes that you are willing to stretch far enough to even believe that the 500% increase rate of global warming would actually lead to anything catastrophic at all (I do not believe so). Either way you slice it on this, I am sorry to say Stormy, you lose.

You are correct however, Global Warming is not a coincidence, that is the point, it is a natural cycle, which is not a coincidence.

I cannot recall who made this comment a while back. They said “It is ok to make predictions, as long as they are not about the future “. Beautifully stated!! Wonder how Al’s” 5 years until the arctic is ice free” will stand up?

“It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.”

We are many who hope for that, but it has been many years since the last snow storm of such magnitude in Denmark.

But maybe we will get very cold weather. October is already far below the 1960 to 1991 average, and many omens points to a cold winter this year.

While it doesn’t alter the author’s point, the North Atlantic Hurricane Season ends November 30, so to say its “about to end” is a bit misleading. There is still officially one-sixth of the season left. Again, not a big deal but, as he points out in critiquing Gore’s movie and other claims, accuracy and transparency is important, in my view.

Actually, there were two hurricanes — Bill and Fred (I think) — out of the total of eight named storms. And of the six named tropical storms, the last two — Grace and Henri — were rather short-lived. In fact, Grace was formed off the Iberian peninsula and was quickly absorbed by a frontal system after a couple of days. This season seems to be decently below the 60+ year average — see:

“It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.”

“I cannot recall who made this comment a while back. They said “It is ok to make predictions, as long as they are not about the future “. Beautifully stated!! Wonder how Al’s” 5 years until the arctic is ice free” will stand up.”

David,
The most worrying prediction Al Gore has made is that the Senate will approve the Climate Bill and the Copenhagen Treaty.

I am in full agreement with everything in this post, and think Gore is a charlatan.

However, I would suggest that in future you perhaps word a post like this slightly differently. Someone in the Phillippines, for example, might not appreciate the contention that there have been no deadly storms in 2009…

This is a blog with global reach these days and we rely on you guys for ammunition to fight the alarmists. Don’t make it harder for us!

“The Senate will pass a green jobs and climate bill before Copenhagen. This might go against what the pundits are saying, but I believe we are on the cusp of this remarkable achievement – however we all need to work our hardest to turn this prognostication into a reality. Now is the time to contact you member of the Senate and demand they support this legislation”.

No records broken I think, as below zero temperatures can come quite early in Denmark. Some years as early as September.

After a long time with monthly averages above the norm, we are slowly starting to see months go below. Nothing spectacular yet, but I believe it will come soon.

The omens are just signs I picked up during many years spending countless days and nights outside in all seasons. Things like changes in flora growth season, certain types of weeds suppressing others in open fields, and similar things.

Ron de Haan: “Legislators from 16 major economies will meet on Saturday to seek consensus on a raft of climate-related policies ahead of December talks in Copenhagen.

As with increasing federalisation of the EU and the constantly expanding power of the un-elected EU Commission, these things go on behind closed doors. As with the first Irish referendum, it matters not if people object, they will think the right thoughts eventually. In the meantime just carry on with the project.

The Conferences are for public consumption, with the usual agonising of “will a deal be reached” and “after an agonising all-night sitting a communique was agreed”. These diversions occupy the Press whilst the real work is on-going by the billionaire financiers and their front men such as Gore and Stern, working in conjunction with the NGO field troops and the UN bureacracy.

“GLOBE facilitates high level negotiated policy positions from leading legislators from across the G8+5 parliaments and from regional dialogues, which are informed by business leaders and key international experts.

Internationally, GLOBE is focussed on progressive leadership from G8 leaders and the leaders of the major emerging economies as well as formal negotiations within the United Nations. GLOBE has a particular interest in the role that International Financial Institutions can play.

GLOBE shadows the formal G8 negotiations and allows legislators to work together outside the formal international negotiations. Without the burden of formal governmental negotiating positions, legislators have the freedom to push the boundaries of what can be politically achieved.

Launched in 2006, by Al Gore and Lord Adair Turner, now Chairman of UK Climate Change Committee, The Carbon Disclosure Project, … is backed by 225 institutional investors speaking for $31,000bn in funds under management, … provides the clearest picture so far of the annual CO2 emissions of companies such as Ford, Google, Exxon Mobil and BP, and their strategies for reducing emissions.

For six years, companies globally have been reporting their carbon emissions data and climate change strategies to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a collaboration of 385 investors, holding $57 trillion in assets under management.

Big, big money for the carbon traders and offsetters, but they need it enshrined in law and they won’t give up.

Third, when the next hurricane “up cycle” converges with global warming and with the Mayan Doomsday calendar in the year 2102, you’ll be asking why so many hurricanes even though you know hurricanes and the 2012 are just coincedences. But global warming is not a coincedence.”

It’s 2012, and it isn’t a “doomsday calendar”, it’s just when the calendar ends. Simple as that and a common misconception.

Juraj V. (01:04:02) :
“SST were rather high during the hurricane season 2009 and still no hurricanes. Ocean temperature is obviously only one of the ingredients necessary.”

I wonder if the Earth’s magnetic field has an effect?

The Earth’s total magnetic field is losing strength by about 5% per hundred years. However the strength of the magnetic field for the South Atlantic Anomaly is decreasing even faster at about ten times the standard rate. Perhaps we should be looking to find electro-magnetic influences regarding hurricane formation, not just SST’s.

Didn’t we have a report go by that the atmosphere was a bit squashed down, thinner depth, due to the solar changes? Something like that… Well, hurricanes have a very significant vertical component. Squash that by 20 to 40% and it’s gonna do something. Compress the jet stream into a thinner band and I could see it chopping the tops of young hurricanes. And it would account for the odd “blustery” winds we get from time to time as the wobbles of jet stream to and frow…

“What you call a blizzard in the US and what we call a blizzard here in Europe is something completely else: Many European countries, such as the UK, have a lower threshold [for the definition of a blizzard].

Well, we are lucky and have the alps, blocking any really nasty weather trying to move through our corner of the world”.

That depend on which side of the Alps you are residing and where the bad weather is coming from.

Last year I was in a blizzard in Morocco and a blizzard in the North of Spain. How about them apples.

In Morocco at several places the snow layer became so heavy that the roofs of houses collapsed. Driving was very difficult, not only because you could not see the road anymore but also because of the tires under the car.

It’s not very helpful to claim that there were “NO hurricanes” when there were two (Bill and Fred). Yes, ACE is very near the low point over the past 30 years, set earlier this year. That’s worth talking about! But exaggerated claims only make it easier for warmists and their accomplices in the mainstream media to discredit the article, and use it to try and discredit the websites posting it.

Something like 20 years ago, climate scientists formed a hypothesis: an apparent global warming trend coincided with increasing CO2 levels which provided evidence to suggest that man, through his use of fossil fuels, was bring about climate change. Plausible? Yes.

With a hypothesis in hand, the scientific method calls for evidence to be gathered, sorted, evaluated which can lead to a theory — a tool that can be used to make predictions about some subject area.

That is where we are today, with a “Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming.” At risk of oversimplifying . . . .

o Using Mann’s “Hockey Stick,” over the last 1,000 years, temperatures were pretty steady until the mid-20th century when global temperatures began to rise along with CO2.

o That CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” which means that increased concentrations will trap more heat.

o Thus, it follows that as CO2 levels continue to rise in the coming years that global temperatures will similarly rise, resulting in, among other things, more frequent and more violent (energetic) tropical cyclones.

And it seemed to work out for a few years but more recently . . . another story. As is so often discussed here global temperatures seemed to stop rising 10 years ago and, as this post describes, those pesky tropical cyclones, at least in 2009, have not become more frequent or grown in intensity.

Now I don’t envy the warmists, having to make predictions and being called to account for them, and all. But with the failure of these predictions, we can conclude that one of the following is true (at increasing degrees of discrediting): the theory is incomplete, the theory is wrong, the theory is nonsense (as Wolfgang Pauli is reported to have said on one student’s work, “that’s not right, it’s not even wrong”).

Try this Thought Experiment . . . in a casino at a Roulette table. A fellow comes up and announces that he has been watching the game and, using his knowledge of mechanics, dynamics, angular momentum, elasticity, etc., has developed a Roulette Theory that predicts that the next number to hit will be “1.” It’s a theory based on hypothesis and investigation and the theory is out there hanging for all to consider all the while that the croupier prepares for the next spin — you know, about one minute. The spin begins and then it ends; and the ball has landed on something other than “1!”

And what about the theory? If you live in a black and red world, landing on anything other than “1” provides incontrovertible evidence that the theory, as stated, is incorrect. So our player explains that he was just a bit too confident — that he should have said that the number was going to be any of nine (a “range” of about 1/4 of the wheel).

The warmists said that temperatures would go up as CO2 went up. CO2 IS up but temps are NOT! And that hurricanes would increase in number and intensity; again, didn’t happen. Their theory, as codified in their models is, simply, incorrect.

Some warmists say something like, “well, our revised theory says that temps could go up, down, or even stay the same for a decade or so. In my casino analogy, this would correspond to the player claiming that his theory guarantees that the next number will be in the range of 00 to 36. Yup! He’d be right every time but theory has no utility — it can’t be used to “win.”

As is so often discussed here, we don’t know what keeps the warmists from acknowledging that their models need work. That there are, apparently, factors and contributions that have not be appropriately codified.

If I had my way, with apologies to Thomas Jefferson, the consensus at Copenhagen would be “Billions for research but not one cent for remediation” until revised the models are validated.

For an article to be framed around the contention that there have been “NO” hurricanes this year, when there have in fact been two (Bill and Fred), probably does not further the cause of climate realists.

Lebbart Bilén (20:23:03) : Dear global warmer. Things are simpler than your long and entangled discourse.
Temperatures, as demonstrated by an NU agency, contradicting IPCC, oscillates according to LOD, length of the day and ACI. See:

You see, we´re going down right now and it will go up afterwards.

And don´t worry about the arabs countries. Have you ever asked yourself why is it so that the Amazon Jungle is right in front of The Sahara desert?
This is because Amazon jungle is to the west and the earth, you know, rotates from west to east, so winds and humidity goes the other way.
If LOD were to slow a little rain would fall to the east side of the atlantic.
This phenomena, of course, is affected by mountains, that is why most of the time all that rain does not reach the west coast of south america due to the Andean Cordilleras.

I never hear anything about the water that is created in a combustion reaction. Fossil fuels all have carbon and hydrogen atoms. The bonds are broken – carbon joins with oxygen to form CO2 and hydrogen joins with oxygen to form H2O. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas also – should it be a pollutant also?? Maybe the newly created water vapor – put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels – results in added cloud cover that cancels out the effect of CO2. I’m not a climate scientist – but, why is there no information about the “other greenhouse gas” that’s formed during combustion of fossil fuels??
John

We can, at least in part, thank AGW promoters for high insurance premiums in the states that occasionally get hit by hurricanes.
Gore & gang have been moving hard wince the Clinton administration selling their apocalyptic prophecies.
Insurance actuaries, who define the risks insurance companies must plan for have been working in a climate that clearly over states risks. And of course, as Gore & gang demonstrate as well, profiteering and AGW hype are also closely linked.
So now, we have four seasons of fewer storms, ACE in a global downward trend, and rising insurance rates.
The inconvenient reality is that apocalyptic clap trap, of which AGW is a great example, is always wrong.
We have been had.
Where can we file for a refund of the billions wasted on AGW fear mongering?

Stephen Goldstein (06:30:02) :
CO2 follows temperature, not the other way. Open a coke and you´ll see it: The more you have it in your warm hand the more gas will go out when you open it.
CO2 is the transparent gas we all exhale (and Not SUV: That dark is SOOT=Carbon dust) and plants breath with delight, to give us back what they exhale instead= Oxygen we breath in.
CO2 is a TRACE GAS in the atmosphere, it is the 0.038% of it.
There is no such a thing as “greenhouse effect”, “greenhouse gases are gases IN a greenhouse”, where heated gases are trapped and relatively isolated not to lose its heat so rapidly. If greenhouse effect were to be true, as Svante Arrhenius figured it out: CO2 “like the window panes in a greenhouse”, but…the trouble is that those panes would be only 3.8 panes out of 10000, there would be 9996.2 HOLES.
See:http://www.giurfa.com/gh_experiments.pdf

CO2 is a gas essential to life. All carbohydrates are made of it. The sugar you eat, the bread you have eaten in your breakfast this morning, even the jeans you wear (these are made from 100% cotton, a polymer of glucose, made of CO2…you didn´t know it, did you?)
You and I, we are made of CARBON and WATER.
CO2 is heavier than Air, so it can not go up, up and away to cover the earth.
The atmosphere, the air can not hold heat, its volumetric heat capacity, per cubic cemtimeter is 0.00192 joules, while water is 4.186, i.e., 3227 times.
This is the reason why people used hot water bottles to warm their feet and not hot air bottles.
Global Warmers models (a la Hansen) expected a kind of heated CO2 piggy bank to form in the tropical atmosphere, it never happened simply because it can not.
If global warmers were to succeed in achieving their SUPPOSED goal of lowering CO2 level to nothing, life would disappear from the face of the earth.
They KNOW IT, they are not that fool. Their objective is another: To make us the slave workers of a world governed by a few of them, like in Aldous Huxley novel “Brave New World”, so we are destined to be the “Gammas” servants and they the “Alphas” masters.
CRAZY as it is, it is their purpose.

In addition to the Phillipines, there was that storm that dumped 100″ of rain on Taiwan. 100″! I consider my home relatively free from flood risk, but… 100″! My word, that’s a lot! Is that a record, anyone know?

It’s like the old saying, “worrying works.” If you fret and worry your little head over any given thing, the outcome will always be better than you feared. So, thank you, Mr. Al Gore, for worrying so frantically and curing the ills that threatened humanity. You anxiety has been well spent, the evil warming is in abeyance. Please stop worrying! It’s now getting cold! Al, you’re in danger of worrying yourself to death!

(please note that this is sarcasm and I have no warm fuzzy feelings for Al Gore)

… the range of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, how much area that is and how that change affects the balance of incoming VS outgoing thermal radiation.

The area within each circle is 4.3% of the total Earth surface area – smaller than one would think.

The range of changes that can happen within the circles will only vary the incoming solar radiation by 1% (2% if you include both of them but Antarctica is already one big glacier so there isn’t much impact from any changes there). Sounds small, but it would be over 20 times bigger than the change that occurs during a solar cycle and it is enough to kick us into and out of the ice ages (sometimes) once other impacts are factored in.

Stephen Goldstein; I’m not talking about a trend and don’t try to change me in a skeptic, because I already am a skeptic. I know Americans think they are the middle of the world, but it’s rather cynical or rather ignorant Watts claims that there were no hurricanes, while in this very months hundreds of filipino’s died and thousand lost their homes because of huricanes.

It’s exactly these ignorant and rather stupid messages that makes it so hard for serious AGW skeptics to convince other people about their argument.

– low SSTs in the Atlantic
– high amounts of dust coming off Africa suppressing Hurricanes
– emerging El Nino in the pacific causing wind shear in the Atlantic

There’s several problems in looking only at Atlantic hurricanes as a response to global warming, which is that they are influenced by El Nino in the Pacific and by dry conditions in Africa producing more dust. A better metric would be to look at global hurricane frequency. An even better metric than that would be to look at global hurricane intensity (hurricane formation is complicated, the most accepted GW prediction is that AGW will increase the intensity of hurricanes which do form). Even with those metrics there isn’t any real scientific consensus.

>>>The sea levels have been rising a few inches every
>>>century for millennia

Has it?

I do wonder about this claim, because the ancient sites around the Mediterranean that I look at tell a different story. (The Med is good for this study, as it has no tides.)

Ephasus (W Turkey) used to be a harbour city, but is now 2km from the sea. Silting of the river, so they say, but it still does not support sea-level rise.

Pharsilus (S Turkey) still has its harbour, complete with (horizontal) bollards to tie up the ships. They are, as one would expect, a foot above sea level, with the harbour wall a foot or so again above the bollards. Again, no evidence of sea-level rise – the harbour wall is exactly where I would expect it.

Both these towns were founded considerably BC and abandoned at the end of the Byzantine era. Most of the architecture is classical Greek and Roman.

Ron de Haan (09:00:48) : Something you should be warned of: In 2008 there was a conference of EU and SA countries (ALCUE) in Lima, Peru. Everything was going apparently OK, until the final draft of the agreement was made: It included an article which was going to make the amazon basin a property of “humanity” (aka THEM). Fortunately the Brazil representative saw this article and, under the menace that Brazil´s president would inmediately abandon the conference as a protest, THEY removed it.

Both sides of the South pacific seas ARE COLD. The transient or seemingly el nino event, in august and september, was the lost of the last remnants of heat, after that, when springtime was expected winter time reappeared here at El Nino area 1+2.

Firtsly the science is settled so I am surprised your asking this question. But for a $200,000 apprearance fee I will attempt to educate you on the perils of AGW and stop you asking questions that are no longer relevant in this enlightened age. We dont need to concentrate on the facts but rather the underlying principles of the peril we’re all in and how we might all change before we reach the tipping point

I convert the decadal hurricane strike counts into traditional point & figure charts (using a 3-box reversal threshold). The beauty of this method is that it reduces the counts into a series of trends. You won’t find a simpler system for generating and displaying trends.

There is nothing out of the ordinary happening in this decade. The counts are in an uptrend for all categories and for majors, but the peaks of these trends are still well below those of the 1940s.

Overall the earth is cooling. There are brilliant scientists who have used patterns in the sun to determine climate on the earth. Some are saying a general cooling on earth will continue until about 2040.

President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals…Mr Obama may disappoint campaigners and foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, who have urged him to attend to boost the hopes of a breakthrough…administration officials have said privately that “Oslo is plenty close” — a reference to the Nobel ceremony that falls on December 10, two days into the Copenhagen meeting…

“It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.”

Despite being a Copenhagen resident I non the less agree with you. Close the city for an entire week with snow, hail, ice and artic freezing I say (and pray).

… the range of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, how much area that is and how that change affects the balance of incoming VS outgoing thermal radiation.

The area within each circle is 4.3% of the total Earth surface area – smaller than one would think.

The range of changes that can happen within the circles will only vary the incoming solar radiation by 1% (2% if you include both of them but Antarctica is already one big glacier so there isn’t much impact from any changes there). Sounds small, but it would be over 20 times bigger than the change that occurs during a solar cycle and it is enough to kick us into and out of the ice ages (sometimes) once other impacts are factored in.
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And that’s why the axial tilt needs to be included in any climate model, no matter the length of time the model is written for. Same goes for sunspot activity.

From what I’ve seen, all these climate models are programmed with an initial set of parameters then run – without any input variables that change over time – aside from the “human caused” and always increasing amount of carbon dioxide.

Leaving out such variables as the ever changing amount of solar influx and the Earth’s axial tilt makes the output of those climate models total bollocks.

I remember when they first included the effects of clouds in the models, that’s when the predictions of the amount of warming started to drop drastically. Hooray for including cloud effects, but are they accurately modeling the functions that drive cloud formation?

What’s the minimum cell size these days of a whole Earth climate model? Around the time they got the idea to include clouds, the minimum cell was 20 miles square (400 square miles) with uniform weather in the entire cell. Such models would be easy for a present day desktop PC to run, given that the average desktop is far more powerful than the supercomputers of 20+ years ago.

P.S. How do I do the italics, bold etc on here? Does it use bbcode commands?

Al Gore made three presentation last week in Argentina (Buenos Aires, Mendoza, and San Luis) and though we are well in spring, temperatures went down 10ºC when he was here, and the day after he left it snowed 30 cms in Bariloche so skiers had a last chance to have fun.

Excellent article. I too have noted the lack of Al Gore-predicted “super hurricanes”. Mr. Gore never has to be right, he just has to “care” and sermonize. I followed the US hurricane season of 2009 and thought we would see some Category 5 or even Category 6 storms.